New Book Lineup for 2018

Join us the FIRST Thursday of the month at 6:30PM at various locations for our book club. Contact info@breadriot.org if you have questions.

The Sustainability Book Club is a fun and welcoming environment for readers that want to learn more about the environment and sustainability. We meet on the FIRST Thursday of each Month at 6:30 PM. A time for snacks and socializing precedes the meeting. Book club books are discounted at South Main Book Company, or check to see if they are available at the library.

February 1: Radio Free Vermont by Bill McKibben.

A book that’s also the beginning of a movement, Bill McKibben’s debut novel Radio Free Vermont follows a band of Vermont patriots who decide that their state might be better off as its own republic.

As the host of Radio Free Vermont–“underground, underpowered, and underfoot”–seventy-two-year-old Vern Barclay is currently broadcasting from an “undisclosed and double-secret location.” With the help of a young computer prodigy named Perry Alterson, Vern uses his radio show to advocate for a simple yet radical idea: an independent Vermont, one where the state secedes from the United States and operates under a free local economy. But for now, he and his radio show must remain untraceable, because in addition to being a lifelong Vermonter and concerned citizen, Vern Barclay is also a fugitive from the law.

March 1: Nature’s Second Chance by Steven Apfelbaum.

Renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise.”

Few have taken Leopold’s vision more to heart than Steven I. Apfelbaum, who has, over the last thirty years, transformed his eighty-acre Stone Prairie Farm in Wisconsin into a biologically diverse ecosystem of prairie, wetland, spring-fed brook, and savanna. In healing his land, Apfelbaum demonstrates how humans might play a starring role in healing the planet.

April 5: One Green Deed Spawns Another by David Mahood.

This book is twofold in origin: the unusual path I (Mahood) followed to become environmentally active brought me in contact with some exceptional individuals. Some are as well-known as celebrities; others have flown under the radar. All of them have equally distinctive stories that have inspired me and influenced my philosophy on our relationship to our habitat and fellow species. This book is a compilation of these poignant moments with my environmental heroes and friends and their insightful ideas, and a tribute to the spirit of Earth’s active stewards.

May 3: Whitewash by Carey Gillam.

In Whitewash, veteran journalist Carey Gillam uncovers one of the most controversial stories in the history of food and agriculture, exposing new evidence of corporate influence. Gillam introduces readers to farm families devastated by cancers which they believe are caused by the chemical, and to scientists whose reputations have been smeared for publishing research that contradicted business interests. Readers learn about the arm-twisting of regulators who signed off on the chemical, echoing company assurances of safety even as they permitted higher residues of the herbicide in food and skipped compliance tests. And, in startling detail, Gillam reveals secret industry communications that pull back the curtain on corporate efforts to manipulate public perception.

June 7: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”

Contact info@breadriot.org if you have questions. You’re welcome whether or not you’ve read the book. Likewise, if you’re unable to be with us but read the book, we’d appreciate your thoughts.